Weekend = No Rest

Our goal last weekend was to crank out 70 miles on the ol’ bikes. We started in Boulder and the plan was to ride up through Lyons to the edge of Estes Park.

We took a “Before” picture, as you do when you train (right?).

The ride started off fairly easy. Most of the hills along 36 were pretty tame. I was watching the cyclists coming up the hills, and boy, did they look tuckered out. I knew that was going to be me in five hours.

Jared made me his bullet coffee and I think that helped a lot. Same with his starch drink he makes. I had both and I could feel the powaaa. He posted a blog earlier with a review on those drinks. I think we should attempt to make it ourselves with cheaper ingredients because I ain’t got no monies.

The Bullet Coffee (I always want to call it “bulletproof”) consists of coffee (of your choosing), Kerry Gold butter, and some kind of oil. He puts it all in a blender, mixes it, and then I enjoy it. All I can remember from the starch drink is that there are beets in it, which turns it pink, the same oil that’s in the coffee, and some energy stuff. Again, read his post.

I think a good idea for a perk to our Cyclyzing blog would be, “A Funny Thing Happened to Me on My Bike…” where I talk about, well, something funny that happened. The funniest thing I can talk about from our trip is the starch drink (I know, right? Booooring ride). Jared told me that beets have boron, which is produces sex hormones. So, then, naturally, I asked if he had a boner.

(Right before I annihilated the rest of the drink)

Oddly enough, I guess, we were warned many times not to ride this route. I think this should be our picture, our theme, our motivation:

And we did ride. We rode hard and long. We mounted the hell out of our bikes.

At points, we had a shoulder to avoid a bit of traffic or a side mirror. Oftentimes, there was absolutely no shoulder and we were on the road with the angry drivers. I remember being that driver though. Fuckin’ cyclists.

Now I’m all, “fuckin’ cars. Don’t they understand we’re limited to what we are able to ride.”

I know it’s hard to tell, but we biked uphill 95% of the way to well, our 35 mile mark. We had to take a different road as the one we were originally going to take was down to one lane for construction or some rubbish.

We reached the top of one road, somewhere and saw Long’s Peak. It was stunning and was the only thing to convince me to keep going. Jared stopped and looked at me: “Okay, so we have a choice: we can go until we get to 35 miles and then turn around, or we can turn around now.”

I stared, shocked that he’d want to give up because we would have to go up this bitch of a hill on our way bike. I said, “We’re fuckin’ training. Of course we’re going to continue.”

And with a bit of a chuckle, he clipped in and off he went.

We ended up sitting on a rock for our break on the side of the road in the foresty area.

There I am, re-applying my sunscreen. It’s sad: I’m more worried about my tattoos fading than skin cancer. Of course, I’m concerned about that, but I really don’t want my tattoos to look like shit from spending so much time outside. And that’s our rock we had to share.

I had mentally prepared myself to have to go back up the hill we originally stopped, Jared questioning whether to continue or not. We made it up the other hills and I swore we had the big one left. When I finally caught up to Jared at the top of what I thought was our second-to-last hill, he said, “It’s all downhill from here.” “You always say that and we always have hills. We have a massive one still!” “No, we just came up it.” “No we didn’t. We have another.”

Oh, and how wrong I was. We kept going down and the hill I thought we had left never came. I realized I was wrong and how happy I was for that.

I was flying down the road, hoping a car wouldn’t hit me when the shoulder disappeared.

We stopped at the gas station so Jared could get water. We still had 10 miles or so to go – all uphill.

I remembered the people struggling up the hills. I didn’t want to deal with it. I kept pushing myself. Perserverence. I’m learning (the hard way?) to stay in the moment. I stop focusing on the top of the hill, but instead, my feet on the pedals, each leg pumping, left, right, left, right, listening to my music, only lifting my head up to watch for cars. It doesn’t necessarily make the ride easier, but it makes it more tolerable, and really, that’s all I want right now.